Cyanobacteria -- which propel the ocean engine and help sustain marine life -- can shift their colour like chameleons to match different coloured light across the world's seas, according to research by an international collaboration including the University of Warwick.
The researchers have shown that Synechococcus cyanobacteria -- which use light to capture carbon dioxide from the air and produce energy for the marine food chain -- contain specific genes which alters their pigmentation depending on the type of light in which they float, allowing them to adapt and thrive in any part of the world's oceans.
"Blue light is most prevalent in the open oceans, as it penetrates into deep waters -- whereas in warm equatorial and coastal waters there is more green light, and in estuaries the light is often red," explains David Scanlan, who is Professor in Marine Microbiology in the University of Warwick's School of Life Sciences.
These specific 'chromatic adaptor' genes are abundant in ocean dwelling Synechococcus -- enabling these colour-shifting microorganisms to change their pigment content in order to survive and photosynthesise in ocean waters, especially when the light quality changes from blue to green.
Professor Scanlan commented on the significance of the research:
"Finding Synechococcus cells capable of dynamically changing their pigment content in accordance with the ambient light colour -- abundant in ocean ecosystems, making them planktonic 'chameleons' -- gives us a much deeper understanding of those processes essential to keep the ocean 'engine' running.
"This will help improve how we look after our waters -- and will allow us to better predict how oceans will react in the future to a changing climate with increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
The researchers made their discovery using data from the Tara Oceans expedition -- which took seawater samples from ocean waters all over the world.
From this data, Professor Scanlan and colleagues analysed specific gene sequences from Synechococcus in the different samples, identifying particular 'chromatic adaptor' genes in bacteria living thousands of miles apart.
This discovery represents a major breakthrough in our understanding of these organisms, which are key primary producers and potentially excellent bio-indicators of climate change.
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With two billion people worldwide lacking access to clean and safe drinking water, joint research by Monash University, CSIRO and the University of Texas at Austin published today in Sciences Advances may offer a breakthrough new solution.
It all comes down to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), an amazing next generation material that have the largest internal surface area of any known substance. The sponge like crystals can be used to capture, store and release chemical compounds. In this case, the salt and ions in sea water.
Dr Huacheng Zhang, Professor Huanting Wang and Associate Professor Zhe Liu and their team in the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in collaboration with Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO and Professor Benny Freeman of the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, have recently discovered that MOF membranes can mimic the filtering function, or 'ion selectivity', of organic cell membranes.
With further development, these membranes have significant potential to perform the dual functions of removing salts from seawater and separating metal ions in a highly efficient and cost effective manner, offering a revolutionary new technological approach for the water and mining industries.
Currently, reverse osmosis membranes are responsible for more than half of the world's desalination capacity, and the last stage of most water treatment processes, yet these membranes have room for improvement by a factor of 2 to 3 in energy consumption. They do not operate on the principles of dehydration of ions, or selective ion transport in biological channels, the subject of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Roderick MacKinnon and Peter Agre, and therefore have significant limitations.
In the mining industry, membrane processes are being developed to reduce water pollution, as well as for recovering valuable metals. For example, lithium-ion batteries are now the most popular power source for mobile electronic devices, however at current rates of consumption, there is rising demand likely to require lithium production from non-traditional sources, such as recovery from salt water and waste process streams. If economically and technologically feasible, direct extraction and purification of lithium from such a complex liquid system would have profound economic impacts.
These innovations are now possible thanks to this new research. Monash University's Professor Huanting Wang said, "We can use our findings to address the challenges of water desalination. Instead of relying on the current costly and energy intensive processes, this research opens up the potential for removing salt ions from water in a far more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable way."
"Also, this is just the start of the potential for this phenomenon. We'll continue researching how the lithium ion selectivity of these membranes can be further applied. Lithium ions are abundant in seawater, so this has implications for the mining industry who current use inefficient chemical treatments to extract lithium from rocks and brines. Global demand for lithium required for electronics and batteries is very high. These membranes offer the potential for a very effective way to extract lithium ions from seawater, a plentiful and easily accessible resource."
Building on the growing scientific understanding of MOFs, CSIRO's Dr Anita Hill said the research offers another potential real-world use for the next-generation material. "The prospect of using MOFs for sustainable water filtration is incredibly exciting from a public good perspective, while delivering a better way of extracting lithium ions to meet global demand could create new industries for Australia," Dr Hill said.
The University of Texas in Austin Professor Benny Freeman says, "Produced water from shale gas fields in Texas is rich in lithium. Advanced separation materials concepts, such as this, could potentially turn this waste stream into a resource recovery opportunity. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these distinguished colleagues from Monash and CSIRO via the Australian-American Fulbright Commission for the U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation sponsored by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)."
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To power entire communities with clean energy, such as solar and wind power, a reliable backup storage system is needed to provide energy when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't out.
One possibility is to use any excess solar- and wind-based energy to charge solutions of chemicals that can subsequently be stored for use when sunshine and wind are scarce. During these down times, chemical solutions of opposite charge can be pumped across solid electrodes, thus creating an electron exchange that provides power to the electrical grid.
The key to this technology, called a redox flow battery, is finding chemicals that can not only "carry" sufficient charge, but also be stored without degrading for long periods, thereby maximizing power generation and minimizing the costs of replenishing the system.
Researchers at the University of Rochester and University at Buffalo believe they have found a promising compound that could transform the energy storage landscape.
In a paper published in Chemical Science, an open access journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the researchers describe modifying a metal-oxide cluster, which has promising electroactive properties, so that it is nearly twice as effective as the unmodified cluster for electrochemical energy storage in a redox flow battery.
The research was led by the lab of Ellen Matson, PhD, University of Rochester assistant professor of chemistry. Matson's team partnered with Timothy Cook, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, to develop and study the cluster.
"Energy storage applications with polyoxometalates are pretty rare in the literature. There are maybe one or two examples prior to ours, and they didn't really maximize the potential of these systems," says first author Lauren VanGelder, a third-year PhD student in Matson's lab and a UB graduate who received her BS in chemistry and biomedical sciences.
"This is really an untapped area of molecular development," Matson adds.
The cluster was first developed in the lab of German chemist Johann Spandl, and studied for its magnetic properties. Tests conducted by VanGelder showed that the compound could store charge in a redox flow battery, "but was not as stable as we had hoped."
However, by making what Matson describes as "a simple molecular modification" -- replacing the compound's methanol-derived methoxide groups with ethanol-based ethoxide ligands -- the team was able to expand the potential window during which the cluster was stable, doubling the amount of electrical energy that could be stored in the battery.
Cook's team -- including fourth-year PhD candidate Anjula Kosswattaarachchi -- contributed to the research by carrying out tests that enabled the scientists to determine how stable different cluster compounds were.
"We carried out a series of experiments to evaluate the electrochemical properties of the clusters," Cook says. "Specifically, we were interested in seeing if the clusters were stable over the course of minutes, hours, and days. We also constructed a prototype battery where we charged and discharged the clusters, keeping track of how many electrons we could transfer and seeing if all of the energy we stored could be recovered, as one would expect of a good battery.
"These experiments let us calculate the efficiency of the device in a very exact way, letting us compare one system to another. Because of these studies, we were able to make molecular changes to the cluster and then determine exactly what properties were effected."
Says Matson: "What's really cool about this work is the way we can generate the ethoxide and methoxide clusters by using methanol and ethanol. Both of these reagents are inexpensive, readily available and safe to use. The metal and oxygen atoms that compose the remainder of the cluster are earth-abundant elements. The straightforward, efficient synthesis of this system is a totally new direction in charge-carrier development that, we believe, will set a new standard in the field."
Matson and Cook's research groups have applied for a National Science Foundation grant as part of an ongoing collaboration to further refine the clusters for use in commercial redox flow batteries.
A University of Rochester Furth Fund Award that Matson received last year enabled the lab to purchase electrochemical equipment needed for the study. Patrick Forrestal of the Matson lab also contributed to the study.
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Materials provided by University at Buffalo. Original written by Bob Marcotte and Charlotte Hsu. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new technique pioneered by UCLA researchers could enable scientists in any typical biochemistry laboratory to make their own gene sequences for only about $2 per gene. Researchers now generally buy gene sequences from commercial vendors for $50 to $100 per gene.
The approach, DropSynth, which is described in a recent issue of the journal Science, makes it possible to produce thousands of genes at once. Scientists use gene sequences to screen for gene's roles in diseases and important biological processes.
"Our method gives any lab that wants the power to build its own DNA sequences," said Sriram Kosuri, a UCLA assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry and senior author of the study. "This is the first time that, without a million dollars, an average lab can make 10,000 genes from scratch."
Increasingly, scientists studying a wide range of subjects in medicine -- from antibiotic resistance to cancer -- are conducting "high-throughput" experiments, meaning that they simultaneously screen hundreds or thousands of groups of cells. Analyzing large numbers of cells, each with slight differences in their DNA, for their ability to carry out a behavior or survive a drug treatment can reveal the importance of particular genes, or sections of genes, in those abilities.
Such experiments require not only large numbers of genes but also that those genes are sequenced. Over the past 10 years, advances in sequencing have enabled researchers to simultaneously determine the sequences of many strands of DNA. So the cost of sequencing has plummeted, even as the process of generating genes has remained comparatively slow and expensive.
"There's an ongoing need to develop new gene synthesis techniques," said Calin Plesa, a UCLA postdoctoral research fellow and co-first author of the paper. "The more DNA you can synthesize, the more hypotheses you can test."
The current methods for synthesizing genes, he said, either limit the length of a gene to about 200 base pairs -- the sets of nucleotides that made up DNA -- or are prohibitively expensive for most labs.
The new method involves isolating small sections of thousands of genes in tiny droplets of water suspended in an oil. Each section of DNA is assigned a molecular "bar code," which identifies the longer gene to which it belongs.
Then, the sections, which initially are present in only very small amounts, are copied many times to increase their number. Finally, small beads are used to sort the mixture of DNA fragments into the right combinations to make longer genes, and the sections are combined. The result is a mixture of thousands of the desired genes, which can be used in experiments.
To show that technique worked, the scientists used DropSynth to make thousands of bacterial genes -- each as long as 669 base pairs in length. Each gene encoded a different bacterium's version of the metabolic protein phosphopantetheine adenylyltransferase, or PPAT, which bacteria need to survive. Because PPAT is critical to bacteria that cause everything from sinus infections to pneumonia and food poisoning, it's being studied as a potential antibiotic target.
The researchers created a mixture of the thousands of versions of PPAT with DropSynth, and then added each gene to a version of E. coli that lacked PPAT and tested which ones allowed E. coli to survive. The surviving cells could then be used to screen potential antibiotics very quickly and at a low cost.
DropSynth could potentially also be useful in engineering new proteins. Currently, scientists can use computer programs to design proteins that meet certain parameters, such as the ability to bind to certain molecules, but DropSynth could offer researchers hundreds or even thousands of options from which to choose the proteins that best fit their needs.
The team is still working on reducing DropSynth's error rate. In the meantime, though, the scientists have made the instructions publicly available on their website. All of the chemical substances needed to replicate the approach are commercially available.
The study's other authors are graduate students Nathan Lubock and Angus Sidore of UCLA, and Di Zhang of the University of Pennsylvania.
Funding for the study was provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Human Frontier Science Program, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Searle Scholars Program, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Linda and Fred Wudl.
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Materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. Original written by Sarah C.P. Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Many chemical molecules can exist in nature together with their mirror counterparts; like hands, two compounds can be made up of the same atoms in the same overall structure but in opposite orientations, i.e. left-handed and right-handed. This phenomenon of symmetry is called "chirality," and can give mirror counterparts ("enantiomers") entirely different chemical properties. A famous and tragic example of chirality is thalidomide, which was originally sold as a mixture of both enantiomers. The problem was that one was a harmless sedative and the other highly toxic to fetuses, resulting in disturbing congenital deformities.
So today it has become imperative to synthesize compounds with what is known as high "optical purity," which is a measurement of chiral purity: the degree to which a sample contains one enantiomer in greater amounts than the other. But because enantiomers have very small structural differences and identical stability, synthesizing one over the other is a very challenging task.
One way to do this is what chemists call "desymmetrization" of a non-chiral compound that is similar to the target molecule. This involves modifying a molecule so that it loses the symmetry elements that prevented it to be chiral.
Researchers at Jérôme Waser's Laboratory of Catalysis and Organic Synthesis at EPFL have now developed a new desymmetrization strategy to access chiral building blocks containing urea sub-structures. Urea derivatives are important components of biomolecules such as biotin (vitamin B7) or bioactive natural products, such as the anticancer agelastatin A.
The researchers made two crucial innovations. First, they designed a non-chiral cyclopropane (three-membered carbon ring) precursor. This molecule offers enhanced reactivity and is ideal for reactions under mild conditions.
Second, the researchers engineered a new copper catalyst that can form an enantiomer of the desired product with high selectivity. The copper center binds and activates the cyclopropane precursor, causing its bonds to break. The precursor is then attacked by an indole, a molecule very important as structural element of bioactive compounds. As a result, the precursor loses its symmetry -- and therefore becomes chiral -- and can be used to selectively make the desired enantiomer.
The work is an important breakthrough, as desymmetrization has never been used to access chiral ureas from cyclopropanes before. "New building blocks can be now easily accessed as pure enantiomers, and can be tested for bioactivity or used to synthesize more complex chiral molecules," says Jérôme Waser. "Moreover, the new catalyst we have designed certainly will be useful for other applications in synthetic chemistry."
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An international team of scientists has developed a water-soluble "warped nanographene," a flexible molecule that is biocompatible and shows promise for fluorescent cell imaging. The new nanographene molecule also induces cell death when exposed to blue laser light. Further investigation is required to determine how nanocarbons could be used for a range of biological applications, such as photodynamic therapy for cancer treatments.
A group of chemists and biologists at Nagoya University and Boston College, have succeeded in synthesizing a water-soluble warped nanographene molecule that is water soluble for the first time. This new molecule, recently described in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, expands the biological applications for nanocarbons, including cancer cell imaging and possibly eradication.
Nanographenes, nano-sized carbon molecules, exhibit unique electronic, optical and mechanical properties, and have been recognized as promising materials for electronic and biomedical purposes. However, the flat structure of nanographenes leads to stacking and aggregation in solvents, making it difficult to dissolve in various solvents and thus causing complications for biological applications.
In 2013, Professor Kenichiro Itami, director of the JST-ERATO Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project and the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) at Nagoya University and his co-workers synthesized a warped nanographene molecule with a saddle-shape structure. The unique organization of the molecule's 26 graphene rings prevents aggregation, making it soluble in most common organic solvents. Moreover, it exhibits green fluorescence when irradiated with ultraviolet or blue light.
"We were really excited when we succeeded in synthesizing the warped nanographene molecule, and we were interested in making it available for biological applications, which we achieved by adding water-soluble functional groups to the molecule," says Itami.
In the latest study, Itami's group explains how they developed a straightforward route to make warped nanographenes water soluble. First, they replaced five hydrogen atoms with boron moieties, through an iridium-catalyzed C-H borylation reaction. The boron-substituted warped nanographene is then mixed with a compound, called an aryl halide, containing water-soluble chains. A palladium-catalyzed Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction leads to the water-soluble chains attaching to the edges of the nanographene molecule, making it soluble in water and other organic solvents. This method can also be used to install other functional groups to warped nanographene to easily tune its properties.
The team examined the fluorescent properties of water-soluble warped nanographene. They found that under ultraviolet light, the molecule fluoresced yellow when dissolved in water, and fluoresced green when mixed in the common organic solvent dichloromethane. The new nanographene showed high photostability, meaning that its properties do not change when exposed to light. Rather, the color of fluorescence changes according to the polarity of the solvents that they are dissolved in.
Next, Itami's team collaborated with ITbM's biologists to test if the new molecule could stain live cells for fluorescent cell imaging. They treated HeLa cells, a strain of cervical cancer cells widely used in research, with a water-soluble warped nanographene solution. Microscopic observations showed that the cells took up the molecule over a few hours and it accumulated in the lysosomes, which are organelles found in cells. Cell viability did not change significantly over time, demonstrating that water-soluble warped nanographene has low cytotoxicity and could be used as a fluorescent stain for HeLa cells.
However, the molecule can turn deadly under certain circumstances. When the treated HeLa cells were irradiated with a blue laser, they exhibited cell death after 30 minutes. Untreated HeLa cells did not.
"Although our new warped nanographene has low toxicity to HeLa cells, we were surprised to find that cell death was observed upon irradiating light to the cells stained with the new nanographene," says Itami.
The specific mechanism of how this cell death occurs is not clear yet, but the group speculates that a toxic singlet oxygen molecule is generated during irradiation and is responsible for cell death. Several other compounds are known to cause photo-induced cell death, but there is still a need to discover molecules that can absorb longer wavelengths to be safely used to treat cancer cells in deep tissues. The researchers envisage that their method to functionalize and tune warped nanographenes could lead to biocompatible molecules that absorb different wavelengths of irradiation.
"We have succeeded in synthesizing a water-soluble warped nanographene showing fluorescence, good photostability and low cytotoxicity, which makes it promising for bioimaging," says Itami. "This achievement is an excellent example showing the output of the extensive collaboration between chemistry and biology ongoing at our institute. We hope that our molecules can be developed further for a wide range of biological applications through further interdisciplinary collaborations."
The outcome of this study not only demonstrates the power of nanocarbons for biological applications, but also shows the rewarding synergy between synthetic chemistry and biology.
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Nanotechnology researchers studying small bundles of carbon nanotubes have discovered an optical signature showing excitons bound to a single nanotube are accompanied by excitons tunneling across closely interacting nanotubes. That quantum tunneling action could impact energy distribution in carbon nanotube networks, with implications for light-emitting films and light harvesting applications.
"Observing this behavior in carbon nanotubes suggests there is potential to detect and control a similar response in more complex, multi-layered semiconductor and semiconductor-metal heterostructures," said Stephen Doorn, of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos and a coauthor of the study, recently published in Nature Communications.
Carbon nanotubes are cylinders of graphene with their atoms arranged in hexagons. They are of interest as near-infrared light emitters and nanoscale semiconductor materials for electronics and optoelectronics applications.
Excitons effectively carry energy in carbon nanotubes as tightly bound pairs of negative and positive charge (electrons and holes). Excitons are created when light is absorbed by the material. Interactions between individual elements of nanomaterials can give rise to new emergent behaviors, such as exciton condensation. Carbon nanotube intertube excitons -- those excitons that tunnel between tubes -- add to the range of observed exciton behaviors.
Research Achievements
In the study, a collaborative research team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies and the National Institute of Standards and Technology showed that Raman spectroscopy (a form of light scattering) can provide more extensive characterization of intertube excitons. The team used chemical separations to isolate a sample of a single type of carbon nanotube structure. The nanotubes in these samples were then bundled to force interactions between individual nanotubes.
To profile the carbon nanotube exciton energies, the team measured the intensity of Raman scattered light as they varied the wavelength of light. Surprisingly, the team found a previously unobserved sharp feature in the Raman profile of the bundled carbon nanotubes. This unexpected feature was not found for non-interacting individual carbon nanotubes.
Theoretical analysis showed that the unique packing geometry produced in bundles composed of a single carbon nanotube structure results in chains of closely interacting carbon atoms. These chains promote the formation of intertube excitons. Further analysis showed that the intertube excitons by themselves cannot interact with light in a way that generates the sharp feature. Instead, an interaction between the intertube excitons and intratube excitons leads to an exciton scattering process that is accompanied by a quantum interference. Such an interference results in a sharp asymmetric feature known as a Fano resonance that was identified in the Raman measurement.
The team's findings now generalize this behavior to a new class of exciton response in carbon nanotube assemblies, suggesting such behaviors may be found in a broader class of 2-dimensional quantum composite materials.
Research team: Stephen Doorn, Erik Haroz and Hagen Telg of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Andrei Piryatinski of Los Alamos; Oleksiy Roslyak of Fordham University; Jared Crochet and Juan Duque of Los Alamos; Jeffrey Simpson of Towson University and National Institute of Standards and Technology; and Angela Hight Walker of National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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The thermoelectric effect is nothing new -- it was discovered almost 200 years ago by Thomas J. Seebeck. If two different metals are brought together, then an electrical voltage can develop if one metal is warmer than the other. This effect allows residual heat to be partially converted into electrical energy. Residual heat is a by-product of almost all technological and natural processes, such as in power plants and every household appliance, and the human body as well. It is one of the largest underutilised energy sources in the world -- and usually goes completely unused.
Tiny effect
Unfortunately, as useful an effect as it is, it is extremely small in ordinary metals. This is because metals not only have high electrical conductivity, but high thermal conductivity as well, so that differences in temperature disappear immediately. Thermoelectric materials need to have low thermal conductivity despite their high electrical conductivity. Thermoelectric devices made of inorganic semiconductor materials such as bismuth telluride are already being used today in certain technological applications. However, such material systems are expensive and their use only pays off in certain situations. Flexible, non-toxic, organic materials based on carbon nanostructures, for example, are also being investigated for use in the human body.
HB pencil and co-polymer varnish
A team led by Prof. Norbert Nickel at the HZB has now shown that the effect can be obtained much more simply: using a normal HB-grade pencil, they covered over a small area in pencil on ordinary photocopy paper. As a second material, they applied a transparent, conductive co-polymer paint (PEDOT: PSS) onto the surface.
What transpires is that the pencil traces on the paper deliver a voltage comparable to other far more expensive nanocomposites that are currently used for flexible thermoelectric elements. And this voltage could be increased tenfold by adding some indium selenide to the graphite from the pencil.
Poor heat transport explained
The researchers investigated graphite and co-polymer coating films using a scanning electron microscope and spectroscopic methods (Raman scattering) at HZB. "The results were very surprising for us as well," explains Nickel. "But we have now found an explanation of why this works so well: the pencil deposit left on the paper forms a surface characterised by unordered graphite flakes, some graphene, and clay. While this only slightly reduces the electrical conductivity, heat is transported much less effectively."
Outlook: Flexible Components printed right on paper
These simple constituents might be able to be used in the future to print thermoelectric components onto paper that are extremely inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and non-toxic. Such tiny and flexible components could also be used directly on the body and could use body heat to operate small devices or sensors.
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As the world's premier winter athletes were preparing to take to the slopes, rinks and tracks for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games, Florida State University researchers were hard at work making a gold-medal discovery of their own.
More than 7,000 miles away from the snowcapped peaks of PyeongChang, scientists from FSU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry unlocked a novel strategy for synthesizing a highly versatile molecule called olympicene -- a compound of carbon and hydrogen atoms named for its familiar shape.
"An olympicene is a molecule consisting of five rings that resemble the shape of the famous Olympic rings," said Cottrell Family Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Igor Alabugin. "This new process for synthesizing these molecules offers a unique tool for the preparation of structurally precise carbon-rich nanostructures."
The team's findings were published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Olympicenes are like the decathletes of nanoscale molecules. Their range of potential applications include sophisticated sensors, information and energy storage, solar cells and high-tech LEDs.
The first olympicene molecule was unveiled by British chemists in anticipation of the 2012 London Olympics. Until now, synthesizing these unique structures was only possible through an arduous and intensive seven-step process based largely on chemistry dating back to the 1960s.
In the FSU team's new technique, an additional hexagonal ring of carbon atoms is fused to the zigzag edge of an existing carbon-rich molecule in two quick steps.
Think plodding cross-country skier versus agile speed skater.
"Our success in developing this strategy allowed us to accomplish a two-step synthesis that is much shorter than the previously reported route, even though both methods used the same starting material," Alabugin said.
It is olympicene's relationship to graphene -- a two-dimensional, single-layer lattice of carbon atoms -- that may hold the most promise for these recognizably shaped molecules. Graphene is a world-beating material with truly Olympian properties: It is an efficient conductor of electricity and heat, it is almost completely transparent and, at 200 times stronger than steel, it is the mightiest material ever tested.
Soon after olympicenes were successfully synthesized, researchers recognized the important connection they shared with graphene. Now, with their new strategy for accelerated olympicene synthesis, Alabugin and his team may have revealed a way to better facilitate the production of what some have dubbed a "miracle material."
"Our approach will allow chemists to synthesize a variety of olympicenes that can serve as stepping stones for the preparation of precisely shaped and functionalized graphene substructures," Alabugin said.
In honor of this year's Olympic Games, the team christened the product of their innovative synthesis strategy "Ph-olympicene," -- the "P" reflecting both the phenyl group crucial to the synthesis of the molecule and a subtle nod to the host city PyeongChang.
Alabugin said he considers the timing of his team's discovery a rare, lucky moment of scientific serendipity.
"The exact timeline for designing, discovering and then having your findings peer reviewed is never certain," he said. "Publishing this new synthesis of olympicene just in time for the Winter Olympics is indeed a fortunate coincidence."
FSU researchers Nikolay Tsvetkov, Edgar Gonzalez-Rodriguez, Audrey Hughes, Gabriel dos Passos Gomes, Frankie White and Febin Kuriakose also contributed to the study. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
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Materials provided by Florida State University. Original written by Zachary Boehm. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Scientists have turned the smallest possible bits of diamond and other super-hard specks into "molecular anvils" that squeeze and twist molecules until chemical bonds break and atoms exchange electrons. These are the first such chemical reactions triggered by mechanical pressure alone, and researchers say the method offers a new way to do chemistry at the molecular level that is greener, more efficient and much more precise.
The research was led by scientists from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, who reported their findings in Nature today.
"Unlike other mechanical techniques, which basically pull molecules until they break apart, we show that pressure from molecular anvils can both break chemical bonds and trigger another type of reaction where electrons move from one atom to another," said Hao Yan, a physical science research associate at SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, and one of the lead authors of the study.
"We can use molecular anvils to trigger changes at a specific point in a molecule while protecting the areas we don't want to change," he said, "and this creates a lot of new possibilities."
A reaction that's mechanically driven has the potential to produce entirely different products from the same starting ingredients than one driven the conventional way by heat, light or electrical current, said study co-author Nicholas Melosh, a SIMES investigator and associate professor at SLAC and Stanford. It's also much more energy efficient, and because it doesn't need heat or solvents, it should be environmentally friendly.
Putting the Squeeze on Materials with Diamonds
The experiments were carried out with a diamond anvil cell about the size of an espresso cup in the laboratory of Wendy Mao, a co-author of the paper who is an associate professor at SLAC and Stanford and an investigator at SIMES, which is a joint SLAC/Stanford institute.
Diamond anvil cells squeeze materials between the flattened tips of two diamonds and can reach tremendous pressures -- over 500 gigapascals, or about one and a half times the pressure at the center of the Earth. They're used to explore what minerals deep inside the Earth are like and how materials under pressure develop unusual properties, among other things.
These pressures are reached in a surprisingly straightforward way, by tightening screws to bring the diamonds closer together, Mao said. "Pressure is force per unit area, and we are compressing a tiny amount of sample between the tips of two small diamonds that each weigh only about a quarter of a carat," she said, "so you only need a modest amount of force to reach high pressures."
Since the diamonds are transparent, light can go through them and reach the sample, said Yu Lin, a SIMES associate staff scientist who led the high-pressure part of the experiment.
"We can use a lot of experimental techniques to study the reaction while the sample is compressed," she said. "For instance, when we shine an X-ray beam into the sample, the sample responds by scattering or absorbing the light, which travels back through the diamond into a detector. Analyzing the signal from that light tells you if a reaction has occurred."
What usually happens when you squeeze a sample is that it deforms uniformly, with all the bonds between atoms shrinking by the same amount, Melosh said.
Yet this is not always the case, he said: "If you compress a material that has both hard and soft components, such as carbon fibers embedded in epoxy, the bonds in the soft epoxy will deform a whole lot more than the ones in the carbon fiber."
They wondered if they could harness that same principle to bend or break specific bonds in an individual molecule.
What got them thinking along those lines was a series of experiments Melosh's team had done with diamondoids, the smallest possible bits of diamond, which are invisible to the naked eye and weigh less than a billionth of a billionth of a carat. Melosh co-directs a joint SLAC-Stanford program that isolates diamondoids from petroleum fluid and looks for ways to put them to use. In a recent study, his team had attached diamondoids to smaller, softer molecules to create Lego-like blocks that assembled themselves into the thinnest possible electrical wires, with a conducting core of sulfur and copper.
Like carbon fibers in epoxy, these building blocks contained hard and soft parts. If put into a diamond anvil, would the hard parts act as mini-anvils that squeeze and deform the soft parts in a non-uniform way?
The answer, they discovered, was yes.
Tiny Anvils Open New Possibilities
For their first experiments, they used copper sulfur clusters -- tiny particles consisting of eight atoms -- attached to molecular anvils made of another rigid molecule called carborane. They put this combination into the diamond anvil cell and cranked up the pressure.
When the pressure got high enough, atomic bonds in the nanowire cluster broke, but that's not all. Electrons moved from its sulfur atoms to its copper atoms and pure crystals of copper formed, which would not have occurred in conventional reactions driven by heat, the researchers said. They discovered a point of no return where this change becomes irreversible. Below that pressure point, the nanowire cluster goes back to its original state when pressure is removed.
Computational studies revealed what had happened: Pressure from the diamond anvil cell moved the molecular anvils, and they in turn squeezed chemical bonds in the cluster, compressing them at least 10 times more than their own bonds had been compressed. This compression was also uneven, Yan said, and it bent or twisted some of the nanowire cluster's bonds in a way that caused bonds to break, electrons to move and copper crystals to form.
Other experiments, this time with diamondoids as molecular anvils, showed that small changes in the sizes and positions of the tiny anvils can make the difference between triggering a reaction or protecting part of a molecule so it doesn't bend or react.
The scientists were able to observe these changes with several techniques, including electron microscopy at Stanford and X-ray measurements at two DOE Office of Science user facilities -- the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.
"This is exciting, and it opens up a whole new field," Mao said. "From our side, we're interested in looking at how pressure can affect a wide range of technologically interesting materials, from superconductors that transmit electricity with no loss to halide perovskites, which have a lot of potential for next-generation solar cells. Once we understand what's possible from a very basic science point of view we can think about the more practical side."
Going forward, the researchers also want to use this technique to look at reactions that are hard to do in conventional ways and see if compression makes them easier, Yan said.
"If we want to dream big, could compression help us turn carbon dioxide from the air into fuel, or nitrogen from the air into fertilizer?" he said. "These are some of the questions that molecular anvils will allow people to explore."
Story Source:
Materials provided by DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Original written by Glennda Chui. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

First, as for the global residential Brass Rods industry, the industry concentration rate is highly dispersed. The top 5 manufacturers have 30.61% sales revenue market share in 2017. The Wieland which has 7.62% sales market share in 2017, is the leader in the Brass Rods industry. The manufacturers following Wieland are Daechang and KME, which respectively has 6.51% and 6.46% sales market share globally.
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Second, the global consumption of Brass Rods products rises up from 2380 K Ton in 2012 to 2840 K Ton in 2017, with CAGR of 4.52%. At the same time, the revenue of world Brass Rods sales market has a rise from 11807.52 M USD to 13683.32 M USD. The reason causes this increase is the growing demand for the Brass Rods products, which is the result of the spurring needs of downstream customers, especially for Automobile.
Third, as for the Brass Rods market, it will still show slow growth, and technological trends in the market will stay stable.
Fourth, market growth for Brass Rods is expected to growth at a CAGR of 3.17% from 2017 to 2022, reaching 16567.95 M USD by 2022.
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